Photo by Freddie Collins on Unsplash
In the last post, I discussed “the impossible network“, an autonomous network designed to protect the worlds people and their data. Before moving on to use cases for such a network, I thought it required a little more clarification.
Many people have said that sounds like project … (insert many blockchain products that store data), however I think this could not be further from the case. SAFE is an autonomous network for a start, I do not think any other project that manages private and public data claims this (private means it must provide some method of self authentication), but would love to hear of any that did. Never mind one with an inbuilt incentive mechanism.
The currency on such a network would obviously be data, but I do not mean that in some abstract sense, I am literally stating the currency in such a network is a data type. Not a separate network or an add on component, but a data type like any other on the network. From a crypto currency perspective the network is the ledger, but in the case of SAFE that ledger is private and most certainly not an add-on, it’s an implicit function,
Another misunderstanding is related to projects that store some data identifier (e.g. hash) in a blockchain, but store the data “somewhere”. That “somewhere” could be some persons computer that they control, or some company servers etc. This is the very thing we are supposed to be removing, Those pesky corruptible intermediaries. To us in MaidSafe this is a huge red flag and almost as bad as just not storing the data at all. If the data can be corrupted, or peoples access denied etc. then it’s simply not physically secured, there is no debate here. If you store the data, then you have the identifier, so there is a dichotomy with those networks that is hard to reason.
SAFE stores data identifiers (in data chains) and also stores and protects the data itself, this is what farmers get paid to do. That is how we commercialise the world’s unused disk space automatically for ordinary people across the globe and provide the cheapest possible secure storage (and computation eventually) for everyone on the planet.
So if you are to remember one thing about SAFE, it is the network, not any humans, which protects our data, this includes controlling all costs, rewards, storage, access, communications and currency.
Now I will get on with use cases, I hope this makes the impossible network a bit more clear. It sounds huge, but it’s actually much bigger than that 😉
Enthusiastic human :-)
Metaquestions 
I like your attitude and your very self human living being. You never come across many people to put it mildly, or to put it realistically, rarely ever you come across people with such bright and differing yet amazing and wholeheartedly friendly and true mindsets such as yourself David. You are truly visionary methinks and the fundamental ideas have huge potentially to be game changing indeed. If people only fathom their real scope and their absolutely ultimate significance that they hold.
Then again, I often think that society is no where near, or actually aeons away from behaving what it takes to make the most use of your pictured and sketched vision and technology, or to even be a part of it to begin with.
Wish you much luck. An admirer. Keep up the good work and fingers crossed.
Reblogged this on MaidSafe and commented:
This is a repost of an article that David wrote on his own blog https://metaquestions.me on the 15th of August 2017.
I have been part of this future of medicine the clients lived in Europe, California and Hawaii .I traveled when needed and had specialist’s sent to their homes. It will become easier and less expensive. Iam getting info everyday about which genetic disease or cancer can be eleminated for $700,000 injection. So iam just a ordinary doc now writing for amazing physician friends that brought medicine to cyber thru a website and incredible network of friends. Now I look forward to learning this new platform because my number one issue way beyond financial return is privacy! Mark
How do you imagine your position and decision in five to ten years?
I think it will only be solidified. As AI allows better data searching/filtering based on real personal preferences then data will become the defining thing of humankind. The first thing we will take to any new planet will be our data.